Soda: Gosling's Diet Ginger Beer is Awesome

I'm always on the lookout for diet sodas that make good mixers. It's a little silly to go for the sugar-free soda given that I'm just going to dump something caloric into it, but if I take out half the calories, that means I can have twice as many drinks, right? (Or something.)

Gosling's Diet Ginger Beer is a perfect example, and my favorite diet soda discovery this year. I'm a fan of ginger beer whatever the form, and this tastes much more like Gosling's regular than, say, Diet Coke tastes like Coke. I feel like sodas that rely on strong but not sweet flavors—lemon, say, or grapefruit, or ginger—tend to make much better diet sodas, as any faux-sugar aftertaste is masked by something stronger. Here, the sharp, spicy ginger bite really dominates, and that's a good thing.

Of course, mixing it with a dark, sweet rum like Gosling's more than makes up for those lost grams of sugar. But I'm finding that I actually prefer to cut the dark stuff with something a little lighter—half Gosling's and half Mount Gay, with a big squeeze of lime, is my new lazy summer refresher, without all the sugar of a Dark & Stormy. I know it's blasphemous on all sorts of levels, but if the classic is a little too sweet for you, it's a great alternative.